It supports the native file formats of several competitors including Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo-Paint, GIMP, Krita, Paint.NET and PaintShop Pro, and the whole suite is designed to make effective use of multi-core processors, touch-screens and pen-input devices.

Chasys Draw IES is currently released as freeware, and is available for computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems.

[2] Chasys Draw is a project that was started in November 2001 by John Paul Chacha, mostly as a hobby than anything else.

The original Chasys Draw was a rather simple bitmap editor done in Visual Basic, a lot like MS Paint save for its ability to do gradients.

[3] Major updates to the graphics code in May 2002 resulted in Chasys Draw DTFx (Direct Tool eFfects).

In April 2004, Chasys Draw Artist was released to the public via the internet for the first time (version 1.27).

The CD5 image format was also upgraded to version 2, adding advanced compression, full alpha channels, encryption and metadata.

Version 2.43 of Chasys Draw Artist was quietly released to the public in late 2007 without any announcements.

The quiet release was due to a decision to re-build Chasys Draw Artist from scratch, while still continuing support for the old architecture.

An experimental version 2.45 was released only to beta-testers for the purpose of testing new technologies that would be included in the new architecture and was officially withdrawn in May 2008.

A new multi-layer tag-based image format was created to support layering and blending modes; this was named CD5 v3.

The next version introduced animation and multi-resolution support as editing modes, and the next one brought in an unlimited undo engine, new plug-ins and several internal fixes.

This version also had shell integration with thumbnails and application-level support for multi-monitor display setups.

Metadata was extended to support save, restore and scaling for text formatting and path data.

A C++ code module output for inline image generation was added, as was a constrained recolor brush.

Some message boxes were replaced with a new popup system, and the working of the workspace was changed to use a back-blitter, which enabled the addition of new blending modes, Screen and Mask.

This application allowed the use of Chasys Draw IES in processing digital negatives, which are popular with professional photographers.

Chasys Draw IES 3.24 was released with a re-designed user interface, powered by a higher performance graphics core and better memory management.

IES 3.63 featured highly improved Photoshop 8BF support, a Silent Install option, Drag-drop to the Layers window, a censoring brush (under fx Brush), Improved RAW support, FastExternals 2.22 with a new callback suite (pi_StateStore), an external histogram window and a new Touch Gadget.

Recent versions of Chasys Draw IES have added high-end features such as adjustment layers, Power Management, jitter-corrected Video Screen Capture, video cropping, digitizer pen rotation (e.g. Wacom Intuos with 6D Art Pen), and Shell-out.

According to the author, Chasys Draw IES is designed under the mantra of Unique, flexible and powerful, and takes a radically different approach to image editing with the aim of opening up new possibilities for those who dare to dream.

Chasys Draw IES can add descriptive information, such as the name and style of font used, path data, etc.

"[8] Chasys Draw IES has been criticized for its steep learning curve [9] and the lack of a native CMYK mode.